Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | stitcher | How to listen
Mark Braude’s new biography, ‘Kiki Man Ray’, visits a place of perpetual interest – left bank Paris in the 1920s – through the life of the singer, model, memoirist and muse. In this week’s podcast, Braude says his subject portrayed the spirit of her age thoroughly, “a mix of deep pain and a very deep love of life” that emerged after World War I.
We’re used to reading about this age, Braude says, through the eyes of Americans in Paris like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Kiki “represents something that is sometimes overlooked,” he says, “the French contribution to this scene and to this moment. People like Kiki were one of the reasons expats found France and Paris so exciting.” She “lived at a very different rhythm and in a very different way. She was just unmistakably herself and didn’t do an air show. And just loved life; she just wanted to do everything and meet everyone and go everywhere, and she did.” .”
Also in this week’s episode, Gregory Cowles and Elisabeth Egan talk about what they’ve read. John Williams is the landlord.
Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We Read”:
We’d love to hear what you think about this episode, and about the Book Review podcast in general. You can send them to books..
